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Civil Rights Act 50 years later: Perspective was black and white

Bob Rathgeber, Special to The News-Press
10:57 a.m. EDT July 2, 2014

President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2, with Martin Luther King, Jr., looking on.
(Photo:
Photograph by Cecil Stoughton courtesy of National Archives and Record
)

"I confess that with a sense of guilt I was oblivious to it," said Frank Mann, the longtime Lee County civic leader and member of the Lee County commission. "That was not a part of my life. I will say, though, that that was pretty typical of most of us at that time."

That certainly wasn't the case for Estero resident Benjamin Payton, retired president of Tuskegee University in Alabama where he served for 33 years. He was on the front lines in the mid-'60s civil rights movement, a contemporary and friend of Martin Luther King.

"This was something clear to many of us," Payton said. "It was an historic moment. Either you grasped it or you didn't and it was gone. We thought signing of the bill was a tremendous achievement.

"It was the time to create change in this country ... (but) change is not created by simply signing a law. It takes more than passing laws. We directed a nonviolent movement that was so important to get more than laws signed. The feeling in 1964 was a very upbeat moment. There were a lot of expressions of determination and hope."

Payton remembers his days in Alabama. With advance degrees from Columbia and Harvard and a doctorate from Yale, Payton signed on as a professor at Howard University. Soon, however, he resigned to take a position with the National Council of Churches, where he directed the movement of volunteers into the cause.

He walked in the 54-mile, Selma-to-Montgomery voting-rights marches and the 1963 march on Washington where King ignited a gathering of 250,000 people with his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Dr. Benjamin F. Payton(Photo: Special to news-press.com)

"I was very much gripped by the sense of getting involved with Dr. King and others who were pressing for civil rights. I left the university.

"Yes, I knew Dr. King. I was not one of his lieutenants. I marched with him. I was working as a participant in the National Council of Churches of the USA serving as national director for the department for social justice for that body.

"We were able to touch people around the country who were ready to get involved. Our job was to make it clear that adult Americans were supporting this. We were putting our jobs on the line to get the word across, especially to Congress."

He remembers arriving in Montgomery in the mid '60s.

"We were confronted by the state police and their German Shepherd police dogs," Payton said. "The dogs and brutal policemen were frightening ... no one turned tail. We were there in the thousands. We marched for several miles from out of town to the steps of the old Confederate capital where Dr. King spoke.

"It was very fulfilling and challenging. We were reminded of the need to exercise care and caution. There was general authentic bravery."

Copy of the July 3, 1964, Fort Myers News-Press A1 page.(Photo: The News-Press)

The 1960s here

Fort Myers was a traditional Deep South town in the '60s. It had two all-white public high schools — Fort Myers Senior and North Fort Myers — and one all-black school, Dunbar. There were two hospitals — Lee Memorial for the whites and Jones Walker for the blacks. There were separate public restrooms for white men and women and one for blacks that was labeled "colored." Restaurants, hotels and even churches were segregated.

The Beatles, the Beach Boys and the Supremes were playing on the radio. The Ed Sullivan Show, Bewitched, Bonanza and the Beverly Hillbillies were among the favorite television shows.

The nightly news with Walter Cronkite was filled with reports from the Mississippi and Alabama about voter registration drives, Ku Klux Klan violence and a charismatic preacher from Atlanta who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize … Dr. Martin Luther King.

There also were disturbing images from the jungles of a country in southeast Asia, Viet Nam, as it was spelled then. The United States had just 23,000 soldiers there at that time, but thousands were being drafted monthly. Viet Nam was at the top of the worry list for the 1964 high school grads.

By summer, most kids had selected the colleges they would attend. Edison Junior College — as it was known then — was the only option in Southwest Florida for whites. Dozens of other all-white public and private junior colleges, colleges and universities were scattered across the state. If you were black, though, you had just four in-state choices — Florida A&M, Bethune Cookman, Edward Waters and Florida Memorial.

One of the Fort Myers graduates in 1964, who has gone on to write more than 100 children's books and is known as "Father Goose," was Charles Ghigna. His last year before heading off to Florida Atlantic University paralleled many of his fellow graduates.

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Marion Redden-Sims goes through family photos from the ’50s and ’60s Tuesday at her Fort Myers home. She took part in numerous civil rights protests.(Photo: Amanda Inscore/news-press.com)

"I'm afraid my friends and I must have been living in our own teenage vacuum during that time, oblivious to the social concerns of the day," Ghigna wrote from his home in Alabama. "All I remember is our inane conversations about girls, cars, school and Friday night football."

It was that summer Mann returned to Fort Myers from college and took his first job as an insurance adjuster.

"My attention was focused on that new job and my one-year-old baby (Frank Jr.)," Mann said in an email. "And I simply was not following national events of the day nearly as closely as I would four years later when I actually was a candidate for school board.

"But by that time I was much more in tune, and in fact, was quoting MLK Jr. in speeches I was giving during the campaign at events in Dunbar. MLK had just been assassinated and the whole civil rights issue was huge."

In the Dunbar neighborhood, though, the atmosphere was charged. The Rev. Isadore Edwards of the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Dunbar had rallied some of the church's black teenagers to make their case for civil rights.

One was Marian Redden, who was in the Dunbar class of 1963 and a freshman at Tennessee A&I University in Nashville, Tenn., in 1964. That summer after her first year in college, Redden came home and took part in protests. One was at a bowling alley in east Fort Myers.

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Marion Redden-Sims, a Dunbar High graduate, was a part of civil rights demonstrations in Fort Myers in 1964 and 1965.(Photo: AMANDA INSCORE/THE NEWS-PRESS)

"Rev. Edwards taught us to bowl at the church," she said, "so we would know what to do when we got to the bowling alley. We went to the bowling alley out on Palm Beach and integrated it."

She also was with the first group of blacks who went to Fort Myers Beach. "Before that, the only beach we could go to was Bunche Beach. When the white people saw us they ran."

Redden, who is now Redden-Sims and lives in Fort Myers, said there were few adults involved in those endeavors in Fort Myers. "It was basically student supported," she said. "We'd come home from the summer. Some of us picketed over three different summers."

Redden-Sims said her parents and teachers got her ready to live in a segregated world. "We were protected from the evils of segregation," she said. "Our teachers prepared us for the world as it was ... it was called the 'white world' and 'our world.' We were thoroughly trained and prepared."

She said she was targeted for college in ninth grade at Dunbar High. "I would say about 50 percent of our class went off to college. We all wanted to select a school out of Florida. We thought life would be much better."

Anticipating a sociological change when JFK unveiled his civil rights plan, she said there was exhilaration. "I remember the excitement. And then the devastation when Kennedy was assassinated. We were afraid it would end our hopes in the progress in civil rights."

Redden-Sims went on to graduate from Tennessee A&I, which is now Tennessee State, and spent many years as a clinical dietician. Some years back she was ordained as a minister in the Christian-Methodist-Episcopal Church.

St. Augustine

At that time, most of the focus on the civil rights movement in Florida was on St. Augustine, which was referred to as the "Birmingham of Florida." One famous incident a couple of weeks before the bill was signed occurred at a motel where a racially mixed group jumped into a swimming pool. Incensed, the motel's owner poured acid into the pool. No one was injured but some of the protesters were arrested, but not the motel owner.

In Southwest Florida, gas station operator A.W. Joslin, of LaBelle, protested against the law's passage. According to a story on the front page of The News-Press on July 2, 1964, he said he would close his Phillips 66 station on State Road 80 in LaBelle for one day as a protest for losing his "right to decide whom I am going to serve or not serve."

President Lyndon Johnson shakes hands with civil rights leader Martin Luther King in 1964, after handing him a pen during a ceremonial signing of the Civil Rights Act.(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

One of the first results of the signing of the Civil Rights Act in Lee County came in the form of a federal lawsuit, filed by Dunbar neighborhood resident John H. Blalock, with help from the local and national NAACP organizations. It came after his daughter, Rosalind, and a group of teenagers were turned down when they tried to enroll at Fort Myers High School.

FGCU professor, Irvin Winsboro, who specializes in black affairs, published a paper years ago titled, "An Historical Perspective on Public Desegregation in Florida: Lessons from the Past for the Present." In it, Winsboro used the Lee County School District as a window into history.

He wrote the Blalock suit was: "asking for an injunction enjoining the Lee County Board of Public Instruction from continuing its policy, practice, custom, and usage of a bi-racial school system for its 11,576 white students and its 2,583 black students. (It) argued that Lee County's dual system resulted in forced segregation of its diverse student population, 'acting under color of the authority ... of the state of Florida ... on a racially segregated basis … provided by the Florida Pupil Assignment Law.' "

In conclusion, "Viewed as a case study, the experience of Lee County, Florida reflects all too poignantly what it took to move Florida from a segregationist past to an integrationist present."

The school board and Blalock settled the dispute in 1965, but it would be another four years before schools were integrated with help of federal intervention.

The Act

The Civil Rights Act was initially proposed by President John F. Kennedy not long before he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. LBJ took up the cause, but Southern Democrats beat down efforts to get the legislation through Congress. Not until senators Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., and Everett Dirksen, R-Ill., worked out a deal that ended a Senate filibuster of nearly three months did the law get enough backing to pass. But by the time it landed on Johnson's desk 13 months after Kennedy's proposal, it was so watered down it was just a shell of how it started out.

Nevertheless, the landmark legislation — the first passed by Congress since 1875 — outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public. But it would be years before some of the provisions of the law were carried out. Afterall, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 that banned segregation in schools was still being ignored in most of the south, including Southwest Florida, until the late 60s.

Rev. Isadore Edwards(Photo: Special to news-press.com)

Florida's 14-person delegation in Congress was against the legislation. Only Democrat Rep. Claude Pepper, of Miami, voted in favor. Lee and Collier counties were in the 6th District and their representative in the House of Representatives was Democrat Paul Rogers, of Palm Beach County, who cast a nay vote.

Fifty years after the vote, times have changed. Could it have been conceivable in 1964 that a black man would be elected president?

As retired Tuskegee president Payton said, there's still work to be done. "We were feeling good about it then," he said. "Now, in many states deliberate efforts are being made to discourage people from going to the polls. It is disheartening to see there are so many people in a position of power who really have not changed. They are determined never to create a level and equal playing field."

The Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Civil Rights Act was written with 11 sections. Among the laws it covered: Barred unequal application of voter registration requirements; outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin in public accommodations; prohibited state and municipal governments from denying access to public facilities on grounds of race, color, religion or national origin; encouraged desegregation of public schools and authorized the U.S. attorney general to file suits to enforce it; made it easier to move civil rights cases from state courts with segregationist judges and all-white juries to federal court.